(re)programming: Community
Talk to Your Neighbours With Astra Taylor

How can we have collective action in the age of extreme polarization, isolation, dehumanization and dystopian imagination? What can we build from the ashes of the Arab Spring, the Indignados movement and Occupy Wall Street? A relentless organizer, Astra Taylor knows the perfect social movement simply doesn’t exist, but in a series of legendary attempts to improve the existing ones she has become one of the essential chroniclers of contemporary acts of collective resistance. Ever since publishing Occupy!, a “semi-regular, forty-page tabloid newspaper inspired by the Occupy movement”, she has been engaged in a lifelong debate about the nature of community-driven power, pushing its limits and analyzing its discontents. We will look at the promises of human alliances against the invisible powers of technocratic regimes.

Astra Taylor is an international filmmaker, writer, and political organizer. She directed the philosophical documentaries What Is Democracy? (TIFF 2018), Examined Life (TIFF 2008), and Zizek! (TIFF 2005). She wrote American Book Award winner The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age and Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone, now out from Metropolitan Books. She is also the co-founder of the Debt Collective, a debtors’ union organizing to renegotiate and resist our debts and defend millions of northamerican households. She writes for The New York Times, The London Review of Books, The Guardian, The Walrus, The Baffler, n+1, and many other outlets. She is a former Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow and a former touring member of the band Neutral Milk Hotel.

Reading List:

[Book]: Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone

[Talk]: Why Democracy Needs Socialism

[Article]: Occupy and Space 

Special guests:

Tjaša Pureber is a performing arts producer, activist and social movement researcher who is currently working on her PhD research on knowledge production, social organisation and participatory art.

Barbara Rajgelj is an assistant professor and researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences, a human rights activist and co-creator of the Pritličje café and cultural centre in Ljubljana.

Asja Hrvatin is a social worker, youth writer and activist for the rights of refugees, especially refugee women (No Border Craft collective), and for the rights of victims of capitalism, such as precarious workers and the homeless (15o movement).